Larsén, Susanne

Abstract [en]

The aim of this study is to describe how four teachers in middle school work to verbally support students´ language and comprehension of subject-specific concepts, and also illustrate what teachers´ express they consider is linguistic development. The research questions posed in this study are: which multimodal linguistic representations do the teachers use in a group to verbally support students’ linguistic development, and what do the teachers consider to be linguistic methods.

The study is a qualitative study with two different methods. The study set out to explore what multimodal linguistic support the teachers’ use in classroom, through observations using an observation scheme based on communicative representations. To find out, what teachers consider, is linguistic development, an interview in a focus group with the observed teachers was conducted. The sociocultural perspective on language and teaching, where learning is considered as a social process together with others, is used in the analysis collected for data. It was found that the teachers in the study use multimodal linguistic support for the students with learning difficulties. The students are able to be involved in the lessons. The teachers often use subject-specific concepts so that they will be well known and used by the students themselves. The teachers talk about linguistic development as subject-specific concepts and have not reflected that they develop the student’s language through the multimodal linguistic methods they use in their daily work with the group, both individually and collective.